KEXP Fall Membership Drive: Tuesday

I had a crazy experience in the pledge room today, one of those minutes where you feel REALLY connected to the people youâ€™re with, even if you donâ€™t necessarily know them well. I kept it under wraps though, because itâ€™s hard to have a transcendent experience with strangers if you havenâ€™t all decided to have one together, especially if theyâ€™re all busy answering pledge drive phones and youâ€™re troubleshooting a computer problem.

It started with Johnâ€™s 1994 themed show this morning. I heard John say that a Lucsious Jackson record came out that year. I really loved that band â€“ girl power! And while I didnâ€™t get to hear if he played a song, just the thought of the band made me a bit nostalgic.

Then the All-Vinyl show swept me away on a trip down memory lane with every song. I got rid of my records in 1994 and stopped listening to my cassettes in 2000 because my player broke, and I never replaced most of the music because Iâ€™m cheap. So it was like discovering new music again â€“ but music I could sing with on the first go through. I happened to be in the booth when John pulled out Fishbone. That was such a good record.

Later, he played U2 and it felt to me like the whole room, the whole building really, was moving together. It was just such a great song. I canâ€™t even remember which song (and I know I could go look it up on the playlist, but the song is not even really the point). It was that we â€“ all my new pledge drive friends, my awesome co-workers, the interns — it seemed to me, in my moment of feeling SO GOOD, that everyone anywhere who could hear the song and the songs that came before, were moving together for the simple pleasure of it, because the music was just so gorgeous. I LOVE stuff like thatâ€¦

I was smiling like a goof from ear to ear and wishing that I were out in the grass somewhere in the middle of summer with a huge sky above my head. The power of music is sometimes more than I can take.